My Heart Isn't That Tidy

There is something about myself I haven’t really talked about here.

I can have romantic feelings for more than one person at the same time.

I can feel love, attraction, tenderness, longing, and connection in more than one direction.

And for a long time, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with that information.

We live in a culture that has a pretty clear story about romantic love.

You find your person.

That person becomes your partner, your lover, your primary support system, your home, your place for physical intimacy.

And once you have found them, you aren’t really supposed to want anyone else.

Certainly not love anyone else.

I know people who seem genuinely wired that way. When they love someone, their romantic world becomes very singular. Their attention and desire seem to naturally organize around that one person.

I also know a lot of people who aren’t wired that way.

We just don’t talk about that nearly as much.

Of course, there are entire communities built around polyamory, ethical non-monogamy, open relationships, and countless other ways people have decided to structure love and intimacy.

But none of those are particularly mainstream.

Monogamy is still largely treated as the default.

And I wonder how much secrecy, shame, betrayal, and heartbreak exists because our actual emotional lives don’t always fit neatly inside the structures we have been told they are supposed to fit inside.

I have spent a lot of time examining the way I have loved.

There were absolutely things in me that needed healing.

I have stayed when I knew something was wrong because losing someone felt more frightening than whatever I was being asked to tolerate.

I have accepted explanations that didn’t match what I could see with my own eyes.

I have made myself smaller, quieter, more understanding, more accommodating.

I have betrayed myself trying not to be abandoned by someone else.

I have worked very hard to change those things.

But somewhere along the way, I also had to consider that not everything complicated about the way I love is a wound that needs to be healed.

Some of it might simply be me.

A handful of years ago, I dated someone who was openly in an ethically non-monogamous marriage.

And I learned something interesting about myself.

I wasn’t particularly bothered by the existence of someone else.

But I needed to be number one.

Even writing that feels a little uncomfortable.

Because what does that actually mean?

Did I need to be the primary relationship?

Did I need certainty?

Did I need to know that when life got complicated, I was the person someone came home to?

Did I need to be chosen, not just once, but continuously?

Probably some combination of all of it.

There was something about knowing my place in someone’s life that mattered enormously to me. I didn’t necessarily need to be the only person who mattered.

But I needed to know that I mattered differently.

Maybe some of that came from my wounds.

Maybe some of it is simply what I need in love.

I don’t know.

What I do know now is that I don’t think polyamory works for me.

I am, in practice, a one-person kind of person.

I want a partner. I want a primary relationship. I want the depth that comes from building something with one person over time. I want the intimacy of really knowing someone and being known by them.

But apparently being a one-person kind of person does not mean I am a one-feeling kind of person.

I can choose one person and still experience connection with someone else.

I can love one person and still recognize that something meaningful exists between me and another human being.

I can feel attraction without needing to pursue it.

I can have complicated feelings without needing to build a complicated life around them.

Maybe that’s the distinction I didn’t understand before.

And what matters enormously to me is being with someone with whom those things can actually be spoken.

I don’t want a relationship where we have to pretend uncomfortable things aren’t happening in order to preserve the appearance of security.

I want to be able to sit across from my person and say, something is happening inside me and I need to talk to you about it.

And I want him to be able to do the same with me.

Not because every passing attraction needs to become a relationship summit. Not because we need to confess every thought that crosses our minds.

But because when something matters, when something changes, when another connection becomes significant enough to affect us or what we are building together, I want us to be able to bring it into the room.

Tell the truth about it.

Be vulnerable enough to admit what we don’t entirely understand yet.

Listen without immediately turning each other’s humanity into an accusation.

Ask questions.

Process it together.

Figure out what it means, what it doesn’t mean, and what we are going to do with it.

Maybe sometimes that conversation would be painful.

Maybe sometimes one of us would feel threatened or jealous or scared.

Maybe sometimes the answer would be a boundary the other person didn’t particularly like.

That’s relationship.

I don’t need love to be uncomplicated.

I need it to be honest.

I need to know that the person beside me is willing to let me into his actual internal world, especially when what is happening there is difficult to say.

And I need to be willing to offer him the same.

Because feelings themselves aren’t necessarily the betrayal.

People have feelings.

People experience attraction.

People form connections.

Some people can even love more than one person at the same time.

The question is what we do with those feelings.

There is a difference between feeling something and secretly building a second reality around it.

And maybe these two things are more connected than I realized.

Part of accepting myself has been letting go of the tidy story about what I am supposed to feel when I love someone.

Part of understanding what happened to me has been recognizing the damage that can happen when someone else chooses the tidy story over the truth too.

I don’t need reality to be simple.

I need it to be real.

And that is one of the things I understand differently when I look back at the relationship that harmed me so deeply.

It wasn’t simply that there were other women.

It wasn’t even necessarily that he was capable of having feelings for more than one person.

I understand that better than most.

If he had been willing to sit across from me and tell me the truth about who he was, how he was wired, what he wanted, what he was capable of giving, and what he wasn’t, we could have had a conversation.

Maybe I would have stayed.

Maybe we would have explored something unconventional.

Maybe I would have discovered that something I could contemplate intellectually was very different when I was deeply in love.

Maybe I would have said absolutely fucking not.

I don’t know.

Because I was never given the opportunity to decide.

And I think that matters.

There is something incredibly vulnerable about telling another person the truth about the parts of ourselves that might make them leave.

To say:

This is how I love.

This is what I want.

This is what I feel.

This is something complicated about me.

And then allowing them to decide whether they want to stand beside us inside that truth.

That’s terrifying.

Because they might say no.

They might decide that what we need and what they need cannot coexist.

They might leave.

But that is the risk intimacy requires.

You cannot create real intimacy while withholding the information another person would need to freely choose the relationship they are actually in.

And maybe that’s why my understanding of loyalty has changed too.

I don’t think loyalty necessarily means never finding another person attractive.

I don’t even know that it means never developing feelings for another human being.

For me, loyalty means I will not construct a reality with you that depends upon you not knowing the truth.

I will not make decisions about your life on your behalf by deciding what you can and cannot handle knowing.

I will give you the dignity of choice.

And I will expect the same from you.

I don’t know whether there is a particular label for the way my heart works.

I’m not sure I need one.

I know I am a one-person kind of person.

I also know my heart is capable of holding feelings that are more complicated than that.

Those things don’t feel contradictory to me anymore.

I can hold love in more than one place.

I can feel connection without needing to act on it.

I can acknowledge attraction without believing it invalidates everything else I feel.

My heart may never be as tidy as the cultural story says it is supposed to be.

I’m becoming okay with that.

Because complicated feelings don’t scare me nearly as much as complicated lies.

And I don’t need the person I love to never feel something complicated either.

I need him to trust me enough to tell me the truth.

I need us to be able to bring the hard things into the room, sit across from each other, and figure out what they mean.

Together.

Because maybe that’s the kind of loyalty I actually believe in.

Not never feeling something for someone else.

Never making someone live inside a reality that isn’t true.